About

Sunday, 19.11 00h09

What Remains (performative installation)

by Lynda Rahal (France)

“Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, … pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, … comedy, pantomime, paintings, … stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative…” Roland Barthes , An introduction to the structure analysis of narrative

What Remains, is a group performance installation that tries to combine documentary practices , storytelling and autofiction in a choreographic dispositif.

This research project is a reflexion on social and cultural identity construction when one’s own identity is uprooted. Through stories of embodiment and cultural re-appropriation, we will attempt to question, multiply and present how we understand ourselves.

How do we embody stories that don’t belong to us ?
How do we cannibalize them ? How do we give bodies new alterities ?
How do we re-construct our own narrative trough the prism of others ?

Based on storytelling and collective movement practices , i ‘m interested in the potential of rewriting the line between personal and collective history. By using speech formats, from anecdotes to miscellaneous news item, historical facts, traditions and contemporary myths, personal memories/ souvenirs and stories gleaned in the city surroundings and on social medias in a ventriloquist manner, we will speculate on history, create fictions and new paradigms, experience kinesthetics bodies relation and try to let merge singular and hybrids bodies, in the junction point between what we are and embodies, between the verbal and non verbal, between reality and fiction.

In these two weeks, i would introduce the participants to speculatives practices that i started to develop in my first part of this research : practices based and borrow from divinatory field like , marseillais tarot cards, oracle readings, numerology, hands lines reading… We would emphasize voice and speeches practices, storytelling , chorus singing practices, and collective movement rituals.

Whats Remains is the second act of a larger project Glissements de Terrains – a choreographic project in several acts that questions the place of the document and the documentary within the artistic act. A series of performances that create and confront contexts and practices in order to try to convey the political complexity of a country.

Glissement de Terrains attempts to make up stories from the ways we see a place, a culture, a landscape or other people, to compare our present view with our past view, becoming both the investigator and the object of its own investigation.

How are stories and history created and formed? How can we tell them?

Glissement de Terrains aims to create a sort of archipelago-archive, an assemblage-collage between unearthed documents and invented documents, quoted documents and documents relating real-life experience.

In the first act Terrain#1, my point of departure was my discovery of Lebanon through an old postcard found in the family archives. The photo of a place, an unknown landscape, and a multitude of stories related to them. In March 2015, thanks to the Roberto Cimetta mobility aid fund, I went on this first journey to physically feel the ground and to draw a subjective map of it based on bodily experience.” The research work was centred around a library of archives and documents gathered during this journey and on the Internet. A collection of audio and visual archives, texts, interviews, working notes and travelogs. These documents, constituted as separate units, shall be inter-related in order to explore their potential for evocation and suggestion. Through interviews and photographies, Terrain#1 sketches the outlines and the perspectives of a paradoxal country and experiments with polyphony.